Melissa Balmain

Melissa Balmain is a writer, teacher, and recovering mime. She edits Light, America's longest-running journal of comic verse, now free online at www.lightpoetrymagazine.com. Her books include Walking in on People (Able Muse Press, 2014), chosen by X.J. Kennedy for the Able Muse Book Award; and The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy-Tale Reboots for Adults (Humorist Books, 2021). Poet Laureate Billy Collins has described her work as "an infectious, often hilarious blend of the sweet and the lethal, the charming and the acidic." Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Weingarten has called it "extremely irresponsible." As a journalist and humorist, Balmain has traveled widely and written on subjects ranging from popular culture to parenthood, from cattle ranchers to collies that surf. Her memoir, Just Us: Adventures and Travels of a Mother and Daughter (Faber and Faber, 1998), is about the days when she was free to run off with her mother and mush sled dogs or hike with llamas--also known as the days before she and her husband became parents of two. Balmain's poems and prose have appeared in many anthologies, and in such publications as The American Bystander, American Life in Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Lighten Up Online, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry Daily, Rattle, The Spectator, Success, and The Washington Post. In addition to the Able Muse Book Award, she has won national journalism honors and the Poetry by the Sea Sonnet Award; she was a finalist for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, the X.J. Kennedy Parody Award, and the Richard Wilbur Award. She teaches writing at the University of Rochester and lives nearby with her husband, their two children, and a pair of non-surfing cats.